As digital media technology improves and the price of storage decreases, users increasingly host collections of digital media (for example, audio, video, images, graphics, and like) on their personal computers and/or network-based data storage services. But users often desire for their digital media collections to be portable. More and more, users seek to transfer all or some of their collections to portable devices. Examples of portable devices include but are not limited to personal media players, personal digital assistants, phones, portable computers, in-vehicle devices, and other devices.
With the advent of relatively high capacity storage on portable devices, users can store large quantities of media content on their portable devices. The process of transferring media files between a host computer and a portable device is termed synchronization. For example, the media transfer protocol (MTP) may be combined with the AutoSync® functionality of Windows Media Player® to accomplish synchronization.
Synchronization is often performed using a wired connection between a portable device and a host computer. For example, in the most common implementation of MP3 players and other related digital media playback devices, the content is placed on the device using a wired USB or “Firewire” IEEE 1394 cable. Certain devices have also implemented wireless data transfer methods using 802.11 “WiFi” connections or Bluetooth. For example, some portable devices allow wireless communication between multiple portable devices or between the device and a web-based service. However, the information exchanged is generally limited to downloads of commercial paid content from a proprietary store, or exchange of information of how to download a particular song from the proprietary store between two paying subscribers. “Podcast”-style periodic episodic content is generally not supported by such systems.
Other systems include the Windows Mobile® operating system platform, which is available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., and is used in a variety of phones and handheld PCs, and the same supports synchronization of a variety of information between the portable device and an associated host computer using a wireless connection. In these systems, however, the portable device's wireless configuration is set up on the portable device itself, using a graphical user interface (“GUI”) of the portable device.
In particular, users employ a GUI supported by a display screen that is incorporated into the player in order to configure the wireless configuration, although a primary function of such a GUI is to navigate among various menus to make selections of media content, control operation of the portable device, set preferences, and the like. The menus are organized in a hierarchical manner and the user will generally interact with user controls (e.g., buttons and the like) to move within a menu and jump to different menus to accomplish the desired functions.
As portable devices accumulate more onboard storage and support more features and functions, the GUIs needed to control them have often become larger and more complex to operate. For example, some current media players can store thousands of songs, videos, and photographs, play content from over the air radio stations, and enable shared experiences through device-to-device connections. Navigating through such large volumes of content and controlling the user experience as desired can often mean working through long series of hierarchical menus. And when such GUIs are also employed to configure other utility functions, such as wireless connection configurations, user operations may often be complicated.